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Meanwhile, the RNC plans to have Breitbart speak at their Election Countdown fundraiser in California.

While the Republican party has invited the infamous video prevaricator and race baiter Andrew Breitbart to speak to their “base” in their “Election Countdown” Beverly Hills fundraiser, the latest victim of his vile shenanigans, fired USDA Shirley Sherrod, is planning a lawsuit. The AP is reporting

This should be interesting as we watch the Republican Party and Breitbart promoter Fox “News” spin events. Will this be a potential embarrassment to their would be donors or a sense of pride of their party’s exploitation of race and lies? We shall see as the Party attempts to embrace its darker elements.

Lawsuits have been starting to pile up on the dark hero and rube of the American right wing, James O’Keefe. In a Pennsylvania lawsuit,

According to the lawsuit, O’Keefe and Giles met with Conway-Russell in an “attempt to entrap” ACORN workers into behaving inappropriately. Conway-Russell told O’Keefe and Giles that she could help them only with mortgage opportunities but not with other matters, the lawsuit said.

O’Keefe and Giles later disseminated the audio and video recording of the interview to “injure and harm” Conway-Russell, according to the lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages.

Such activities violate Pennsylvania’s wiretap laws. In Maryland, O’Keefe, accomplice Giles, and Breitbart.com are being sued in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City for,

“The video and audio footage was taken without the knowledge of Williams and/or Thompson and in violation of Maryland’s Courts and Judicial Proceedings Code §§ 10-402(a) and 10-410, which requires two party consent to all electronic surveillance. Violation of the law is a felony, and entitles parties whose rights were violated to sue,” ACORN said in a statement announcing the suit.

ACORN’s general counsel, Arthur Schwartz, said the acts of O’Keefe and Giles in making the hidden-camera taping were “clear violations of Maryland law.”

Of course, all these attacks on ACORN along with the dubious “voter fraud” charges the rightwing has continually tried to gin up to tap into some racist tendencies in the “tea bag” movement and insinuate that was how Obama got elected and the obvious attempt to defund it was to attack any infrastructure the have nots can have for a political organizing voice as revealed in “ACORN’s Vindication: Too Little Too Late” by Katrina Vanden Heuval,

According to Lewis, damage to ACORN’s work on the ground includes “10,000 people minimum” who will not obtain free tax preparation services from ACORN. In the past, ACORN has helped them file for the Earned Income Tax Credit and thereby “put billions of dollars back into low-income neighborhoods.”

“We’ve had to suspend that. That’s a direct affect on poor people, and you know we were commended by the IRS prior to the right-wing attacks,” said Lewis.

Lewis also said ACORN must curtail its fight against foreclosures. “About 200,000 people that we won’t be able to help directly,” she said, noting that this comes at a moment when the Obama Administration has admitted its own anti-foreclosure plan has fallen short because bailed-out banks aren’t cooperating.

Finally, Lewis said loss of funding has impacted ACORN’s fight to address wage and hour disparities — workers who aren’t paid the minimum wage, cheated out of overtime, unfairly dismissed or discriminated against — “people just totally taking advantage of low-wage workers in this economy.”

And now we have the arrest of O’Keefe in more illegal activity involving Senator Landrieu’s office. Let’s look into the connections into this operation. Arrested along with O’Keefe were Stan Dai, Joseph Basel, and Robert Flanagan, son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana. Let’s take a peek at one of them, the circumstances and also the various rigtwing organizations surrounding the episode and events around Mary Landrieu’s (D) La., office. As reported by Lindsay Beyerstein at Alternet in “James Bond Wannabe Part of Right-Wing Plot to Tamper with Senator’s Phones“,

The circumstances of Dai’s arrest are difficult to square any theory that the men were just checking the protocols of Landrieu’s phone system. A federal law enforcement official told the Associated Press that one of the four suspects was arrested a few blocks away in a car with “a listening device that could pick up transmissions.” Another anonymous official told MSNBC that the man in the car was Stan Dai. It’s unclear why the listening device wasn’t mentioned in the affidavit. The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Louisiana declined my request for further comment.

So who is Stan Dai and what and who is he connected with? Well let’s take a look in the same article,

In 2008, Dai served as associate director of the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity Washington University. The ICCAE is funded by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and charged with recruiting the next generation of spooks. A university official assured Laura Rozen of Politico that Dai was a civilian whose job with the university ended in 2008 when the grant money ran out.

Last June, Dai was a featured speaker on torture and terrorism at a “CIA Day” for students in the Junior Statesmen of America’s summer school. The mission of the Junior Statesmen, according to the organization’s Web site, “is to strengthen American democracy by educating and preparing high school students for life-long involvement and responsible leadership in a democratic society.” The students visited Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va., and then returned to Georgetown for a series of lectures.

Let’s look at the brochure or packets from the CIA program at which Dai was a speaker called “Annual Junior Statesman Summer School” Speakers Program. It cites his occupation as “freelance consultant”. It lists his career history as
a former Assistant Director of the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence at Trinity Washington University, as serving as the Operations Officer of a Department of Defense irregular warfare fellowship program, and also as an Undergraduate Fellow on Terrorism of the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracies (a neoconservative think tank with ties to Richard Perle). The topics listed he spoke about at that session concerned “Torture” and “Domestic terrorism”. Concerning questions listed as “possible questions” are listed,

D. Possible Questions
1. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has defended the Bush administration’s policies on surveillance, interrogation and detention as crucial factors that have protected the homeland. How much valid is the former administration’s assertions that these kinds of policies have prevented another terrorist attack on the United States?

2. President Obama has announced he will close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. He has announced he will close CIA black sites around the world, where they interrogate terror suspects. Says he will make CIA interrogators abide by the Army Field Manual, defined waterboarding as torture and ban it, suspend trials for terrorists by military commission, and now eliminate the label of enemy combatants. By taking those steps, do you believe the president of the United States has made Americans less safe?

Of course to anyone that supports the rule of law, the Constitution of the United States, and International Law based on the Principles set at Nuremberg, knows that torture, Guantanamo Bay, and CIA black sites are all illegal through the aforementioned. Who else does the ODNI fund besides the ICCAE? It funds or directs Proteus USA. Why would O’Keefe need such an connection or such “expertise”?

What about the groups harrassing Landrieu’s office? Are they helping the “spin” by participating in disruption? As quoted in AlterNet article,

Their defenders hypothesize they were just “checking” on the senator’s phone lines to make sure that constituent calls weren’t being blocked. Some conservative groups have complained bitterly in recent weeks that they couldn’t get through to Landrieu. Certain paranoid elements of the right speculated that Landrieu had “done something” to her phones to make it easier to ignore their calls. (A rather pervasive and simpler technology for that does exist; it’s called voicemail.)

Groups involved in defending or aiding the bogus defense of this felony it seems are the Family Research Council , the Baton Rouge Tea Party, and the Chamber of Commerce (who must still be working from the Powell Memo). The American people need for a political party or movement to emerge that will fight the attacks on our democracy. The Democratic Party under the influence of the DLC or “centrists” seems or has been inadequate.